I can readily see that I am not the intended reader for The Unauthorised Life of Ted Hughes. Born in the year his first book of poems came out (The Hawk in the Rain, 1957); made to read Hughes at school (I preferred Sylvia Plath); a graduate of the same university (Cambridge); my books published by the same publisher (Faber), and sharing (if at all) the same bookstore shelves (between Heaney and Hughes, not necessarily a fate I'd wish on anyone); the co-editor with my friend James Lasdun of a book (After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, 1994) that restored Hughes to public confidence, admiration, and good odour, and paved the way for his own Tales from Ovid (1997) and, I believe, also Birthday Letters the following year; a minor attendee at his commemorative service in Westminster Abbey in 1999; a reader of Elaine Feinstein's earlier biography (2001), and a reviewer of the Collected Poems (2003), I can see my life and work as having been spent pretty exactly – almost studiedly – in his shadow. But if not me, then who? And even if its perceived or intended readership, determined as much or more by the publisher and agent as by the author, are people who need to be told what Roget's Thesaurus is, so that they don't misunderstand Plath's wicked early self-characterisation as a 'Roget's trollop' – shouldn't it have something for me as well?

Devoted fans have been awaiting the sequel to Gregory David Roberts's cult classic Shantaram for twelve years. A bestselling book in Australia and overseas, Shantaram centres on Lin, an escaped Australian criminal who becomes a Bombay gangster. Loosely based on the author's own life, Shantaram encouraged an intriguing frisson between the writer and his protagonist.

Paul Keating continues to fascinate. Influential commentators such as Paul Kelly and George Megalogenis now celebrate the golden age of policy reform in which he was central, while lamenting the policy desert of recent years. Still, it is not enough: Keating, the master storyteller, wants to control the narrative of his legacy. Yet he professes disdain for biography and memoir, and is niggardly with applicants for an audience. Researchers go ahead anyway, drawing on Keating's associates and on public domain resources, to reach conclusions that Keating may not like.

How then is Keating to regain control of his story? By accepting the approach, not of some earnest academic, but of Kerry O'Brien, one of the remnant 'god journalists' (as Margaret Simons once classified them). Respected and trusted by the demographic to which this book will appeal, O'Brien is the perfect interlocutor, until the right biographer comes along – for, on the evidence of this book, Keating's supposed lack of interest in biography is disingenuous.

O'Brien's book comprises extended transcripts from O'Brien's four-part television series, Keating: The Interviews (ABC, 2013), now elaborated through further questioning. It is ninety per cent Keating. This is not to diminish O'Brien's contribution. He asks the right questions. He provides concise and informative introductions framing each chapter. His interviews skilfully map Keating's life and achievement, the nature of political life, the details of policy development, and the relations with colleagues, opposition leaders, and his partner (and rival) in dominance of their era: Bob Hawke.

The port of Old Harwich can be approached by a streamlined highway through a barren industrial landscape, or via the high street through suburban Dovercourt. Either way, you keep going until you reach the sea: 'and if you get your feet wet, you've gone too far', they'll say when you ask directions. Finally, you reach an enclave of narrow streets lined by small cottages and terraces huddled together with their backs to the North Sea winds and surrounded on three sides by the Stour estuary. Beyond the dock areas, where a variety of fishing boats, yachts, and barges are moored and pigeons and seagulls ride the stiff updrafts, old men in fluorescent jackets mess about in smaller boats. Further away, the concrete and containers give way to a beach lined with pebbles and myriad tiny blue mussels, bleached oysters, and slipper shells.

Along the Quay, a small number of American tourists make pilgrimages to the miniature museum housed in the ticket office to the Ha'penny Pier. 21 Kings Head Street, diagonally opposite Randolph Stow's old house, is the birthplace of Christopher Jones, the captain of the Mayflower. Joseph Conrad – with whom Stow felt a particular psychological affinity – would have felt at home here when he passed through in 1896, and again in July 1914, on his way to Poland.

Local landmarks include the Customs House, two lighthouses, and a fortress: Harwich was once a garrison town, encircled by a medieval wall against Scandinavian invaders. Stories persist of inns with bunks built into the walls and chains attached – 'They'd drop a shilling in your beer, and then you'd have taken the King's shilling', the locals enjoy telling you. 'You'd wake up next day, with a sore head, out at sea.'  Others reputedly featured tunnels dug from one to another, to expedite the movement of smugglers.

The streets of New Orleans double as scented gardens for the blind. Round any corner in the Vieux Carré – known to most as the French Quarter – and experience the assault of sensory details. It might start with a spicy tang of boiling seafood, crawfish, or shrimp or crabs plucked from the amphibious Louisiana land. Maybe it's frying beignets or praline mixture bubbling on stoves, or one of those fluorescent alcoholic drinks that bartenders pour inside goldfish bowls and sell to tourists from the Mid-west to sip as they stroll through the Quarter, convinced that they've reached the precipice between civilisation and debauchery.

Then it comes. Somewhere in the middle of defining the precise scent, your ear tunes itself to the city's true heartbeat. First you might hear the trombone. Now the trumpet and tuba combine to release the city's musical gift to the world. In New Orleans, second-line jazz parades are more common than changes in the weather. They begin with one group – the women's Pussyfooters Club, say, out doing what they do to pass a good time, in the local parlance – but open themselves to anyone who wants to dance through the humidity that assaults the city for the six months, sometimes more, that New Orleanians call summer. If you're unlucky enough to miss those second-lines, turn another corner and find a band – slick or rag-tag, most of them better than any you'd hear in a club in other cities – out busking for tips.

It's not the heat, it's the humidity, goes one local adage, and the subtropical air can feel more like an assailant than a necessity. This is one reason for the larghissimo tempo. Don't expect the simple things to function here. If they do, it won't be long before heavy weather rolls in and thunder sends the city's graceful, termite-infested wooden houses atremble, knocking out electricity, sometimes for days. If you can't forget that most of the world runs on some semblance of a schedule, you may need to find another home. If you have the good fortune to discover one that radiates a more lavish spirit, please give the rest of us directions.

Towards the end of Fiona McFarlane's enigmatic collection of short stories, The High Places, we meet the odd, enchanting story 'Good News for Modern Man', which functions as a key to many of the book's concerns. The story centres around Dr Bill Birch, a malacologist undertaking an obsessive study of a colossal female squid, Mabel, which he has trapped in New Zealand. Overseeing Birch's quirky undertakings is the ghost of Charles Darwin, who sprints alongside Birch 'in his nineteenth century socks', a figment of Birch's imagination. As the story progresses, we gain insight into the zeal gripping Birch, from the moment he loses his faith in God to his rationalist understanding that he is simply an animal among animals, and his subsequent quest to free Mabel so she can 'remain a mystery'.

In another writer's hands, this material might function as a whimsical eco-critical fable about the impossibility of knowing the animal Other, but for McFarlane it is a vastly more interesting and complex enterprise. The surrounding cast of characters express their concern for Dr Birch, who, we intuit, is hallucinating, and possibly suffering from some kind of tropical malaise; we sense his passion but doubt his sanity. His identification with Mabel is all-encompassing, transcending the realm of usual concern or belief; his surety and self-righteousness are alarming. The reader is thus cast in the pleasurably discomfiting role of rationalist, asked to see past the protagonist's myopia and grope towards the truth.

Just in time for the Frank Sinatra centenary – 12 December should be a gazetted public holiday – comes the thumping second part of James Kaplan's monumental biography. Taken together, Volume I – Frank: The Voice (2010, 786 pages) – and its behemoth successor, Sinatra: The Chairman (979 pages), comprise a formidable and scrupulously detailed account of the rise, fall, and resurrection of Saint Francis of Occhi Azzurri.

As the song goes, that's life; and Sinatra's life, from 1954 to his death in 1998, was one lived in full. But Volume II is a bit of a slog. By the time I reached the end of this positively Wagnerian tome – admittedly, more ring-a-ding-ding than Der Ring, but still unsparing of its subject's flaws – it took more than two fingers of Jack Daniel's to bring me round. More of this later.

It has been five years between volumes, and how fitting to divide such a labyrinthine, conflicted life between them. In effect, Kaplan has been dealing with two Sinatras. For proof, look no further than the pictures on the respective covers. Frank: The Voice is the rapier-slender model: fedora-topped, scrawny neck poking out of an unbuttoned shirt collar with tie askew, head cocked to the right, carefree expression. Sinatra: The Chairman shows the darker side: no longer the boy singer, but someone more worldly-worn, though clearly executive material in his charcoal jacket, striped shirt, and button-down collar securing a narrow black tie. He is hatless (toupée presumably fixed firmly in place) and looking down to the right with a serious, almost perturbed expression.

In Jo Case's 'Something Wild', young single mother Kristen is tempted to rediscover 'the thrill of doing what she feels like, just to see what happens'. She could be speaking for characters in many of the pieces in The Best Australian Stories 2015, a collection that features people on the verge of transgression. As Amanda Lohrey writes in her introduction, itself a compact work of art, the stories all contain 'an element of danger'; risk is palpable in the sexual and power-driven desires that overflow these narratives, with transgression enacted by, or perpetrated against, central characters. The possibility of forging an ethical self and the wish to be self-determining – the need 'to steer something in a direction she chose' identified by the protagonist of Eleanor Limprecht's 'On Ice' – are associated and equally significant thematic concerns. The realisation that being authentic might involve flouting social mores, cultural markers, or even, simply, entrenched behaviours is sometimes overt, sometimes implicit.

Almost all of the short fiction here has been published previously in a range of literary journals, anthologies and collections, with Meanjin well represented. Lohrey reprises her 2014 editorial role; five of the authors represented in The Best Australian Stories 2014 are also found in this book. Of these five stories, Mark Smith's 'Manyuk', Julie Koh's 'The Level Playing Field', and Nicola Redhouse's 'Vital Signs' constitute effective companion pieces to their 2014 equivalents. 'Alphabet', by Ryan O'Neill, builds upon possibilities of language and structure explored in the author's 2014 story. Claire Corbett's '2 or 3 Things I Know About You' is not as strong as her 2014 piece – though flash fiction is a welcome inclusion – and suffers through following the sustained act of imagination in 'Picasso: A Shorter Life'; however, Corbett's 'teen girl stalker' does provide an effective antidote to John A. Scott's disturbingly misogynistic central character.

In 1980, when I first came to Melbourne from Sydney, I found myself working among homeless people in the inner city. I was guided by a fantastic nun, one of those forthright people with a fearless sense of justice. She stood up to police and clergy alike. One day we had a long wait in the casualty department of St Vincent's Hospital with a gentleman from the streets who had been in a brawl. I learned much from the way in which others would avoid sitting near us. As we waited, the nun told me that not everyone had time to wait so long. She understood that the hospital had a special room set aside 'in case Mr Santamaria ever got sick'.

I doubt that such a room existed. If it did, it would probably have been for anyone whose public profile required greater privacy. The curious thing is that such a no-nonsense servant of the poor was able to believe such nonsense.

This is the kind of story that Gerard Henderson wisely avoids in his biography of B.A. Santamaria. He notes that his work is based on the written record and on the evidence of 'people who knew Santamaria'. But I could tell dozens, even scores, of tales a bit like that of the nun. Some would be based on fact, others on myth; some would be flattering, others far from it. I could tell you of a priest who only had to get a parking ticket to start ranting about all the iniquities of Bob Santamaria, something that says more about the bizarre relationship of the priest's subculture to authority than anything else. Nevertheless, taken together, such stories point to a figure with a mystique possibly unparalleled in Australian history.

Dressed in a suit, standing beside a prime minister, Peter Garrett never looked totally convincing as a cabinet minister. We recalled his onstage persona in Midnight Oil, stooped and balding, a towering figure struggling to contain his energy and passion.

Garrett was minister for the environment, heritage, and the arts in the first Rudd ministry; after the 2010 election, he became minister for school education. He achieved some major successes in the former role, but then he became a scapegoat for the deaths of four home insulators in what became known as the 'pink batts' scandal. The subsequent Royal Commission failed to uphold the wilder claims of misconduct by Garrett as minister, but was somewhat critical of his oversight of the program.

As the relevant minister, Garrett played a crucial role in the negotiations concerning the Gonski review. Given the need to satisfy eight different state and territory governments and the bitter opposition of the private school lobby (supported by a feral opposition), he displayed considerable talent as a negotiator. (Julia Gillard, in her memoirs, devotes several paragraphs to her decision to ask Garrett to take over the schools portfolio.) Nonetheless, the popular image of him as a minister remains that of a well-meaning outsider, the klutz who failed to conquer Canberra. At least as far back as the film Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), popular culture has relished the trope of the idealistic but naïve person caught up in the wiles of the political insiders.

Sleater-Kinney, an American rock trio, are closely associated with the cities of Olympia and Portland, in the Pacific Northwest. In the mid-1990s, when Sleater-Kinney formed, the region was home to a thriving, if somewhat puritan, independent music scene, one in which participants prided themselves on their distance – both geographic and cultural – from the mainstream. The scene was politicised and enquiring; at live shows, house parties, and in self-published zines, this punk rock community held an ongoing dialogue with itself. 'We operated as if in a constant seminar,' writes Carrie Brownstein, one of Sleater-Kinney's two founding members.

As Brownstein recalls in her memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Sleater-Kinney began not in the United States, but in Australia. In 1994, at the age of nineteen, Brownstein and her fellow guitarist and vocalist Corin Tucker flew to Sydney, intending to start a band. They had little money, but they were rich in a sense of youthful adventure; one that led, notes Brownstein dryly, to 'frequent errors in judgement and manners'. Sleater-Kinney played their first shows in Sydney before the duo decamped to Melbourne, where they acquired a drummer, Laura MacFarlane, and recorded their first album inside a garage.

Australia does not have a great tradition of writers producing books on international affairs for a general audience. Along with others like Hugh White, Michael Wesley – a former head of the Lowy Institute now based at the Australian National University – is helping to correct this.

His previous work, There Goes the Neighbourhood: Australia and the Rise of Asia (2011), won the John Button Prize for writing on public policy and politics. Wesley's latest book, Restless Continent: Wealth, Rivalry and Asia's New Geopolitics, has some similarities with that earlier work. Both are concerned with the nature and future of Asian economics and geopolitics, and how these are influenced by history and culture; and both are written in an energetic, accessible style. But whereas There Goes the Neighbourhood was focused more on Australia's role in Asia, Restless Continent concentrates on Asia's internal dynamics. The result is a sober, though not depressing, work.

Asia, according to Wesley, is being shaped by two 'trends' (an increasing economic interdependence and 'strategic claustrophobia') and two 'conditions' (a cultural sensitivity to hierarchy, which leads to rivalry, and a fluctuating military balance of power playing out in a distinctive geography).

In 2010, writing in Westerly, Carmel Lawrence despaired about the lack of science writing in the collection of 'best non-fiction' of the year that she had been asked to review. It wasn't, she concluded, for want of material. Science writing had undergone a huge resurgence in popularity at the turn of the twenty-first century. With no major anthologies of Australian science writing, nor a regular prize, it was difficult to gauge how well the genre was doing in Australia at the time. Were we missing great science writers like Primo Levi, Rachel Carson, or Carl Sagan? Was it just that such factual writing, in Australia, is not seen as sufficiently literary, or that literary writing – the beautiful, moving, engaging – is not regarded as sufficiently objective to be scientific?

The publication of The Best Australian Science Writing anthologies by NewSouth, annually since 2011, has gone a long way towards addressing some of Lawrence's concerns. Science writing is doing very well in Australia, it seems, despite the smallness of the market and the continual waxing and waning of science magazines. While the anthology does not provide a venue for new science writing, it does afford recognition of some of the outstanding work that has already been published, bringing it together into one body of like-minded work.

Words and their meanings, more than any other aspects of language, hold a special fascination for people. Perhaps it is because, unlike these other features (which are set down during childhood), they continue to be acquired throughout one's lifetime. Words and their meanings are also intimately tied to the life and culture of speakers, and all sorts of perspectives on the human psyche can be gleaned from their study.

It is not surprising then that words have received so much attention over the years from lexicographers, linguists and literaticians – and from the very folk who use them. But Nick Enfield's is a new and different approach, one that connects a wide range of discipline areas and offers an account of linguistic meaning that is like no other. The difference is his utilitarian view: '[T]o truly understand a word, we must ask not what it means. Instead, we must ask: What are people's reasons for using it?' Drawing on case studies from Lao (the official language of Laos) and occasional forays into English, Enfield investigates a range of semantic domains including emotion terms, landscape terminology, taste, and flavour expressions. By examining the private life of meanings (what we all carry around in our heads) and their 'public careers', Enfield shows how the usefulness of words can account for what they are like and why they are this way.

Alongside the current boom in political memoir, with its tendency to self-aggrandisement, score-settling, and justification of the indefensible, there grows quietly a small but compelling genre of books that explore the craft and policy purpose of various types of political work. Notable examples from Melbourne University Press include James Button's Speechless: A Year in My Father's Business (2012), Kim Carr's A Letter to Generation Next: Why Labor (2013), and Allan Behm's No, Minister (2015). John Brumby's The Long Haul is the next instalment.

Regrettably, Victoria's forty-fifth premier (2007–10) succumbs to the temptations of legacy-maintenance before attending to his avowed intentions. Brumby's 'lessons from public life' are preceded by a lengthy biographical account, starting with the moocow coming along the road and finishing with the defeat of the Brumby government at the 2010 election. He insists that he had no great ambition to enter politics, no grand plan, and was invited to serve at every turn (although he did suffer at the hands of careerist scoundrels). Nearly everything that went wrong was someone else's fault: when Brumby erred, it was in trusting the wrong people; or trusting the right people too much; or in being too modest, too scrupulous, too candid.

'Freg nisht dem royfe, freg dem khoyle – Don't ask the doctor, ask the patient,' my grandmother says in Yiddish, one of eight languages at her disposal, having grown up in Europe during World War II and migrated as a teenager to the multilingual melting pot of Israel. I smile and ask her for another gem. My grandmother obliges, this time with a juicy-sounding Bulgarian phrase with a similar meaning: 'Ne pitai uchilo, pitai petilo – Don't ask the learned, ask the experienced.'

The word patient comes from the Latin verb pati, meaning to suffer or endure. So do patience, passion, and compassion. The notion of receiving medical treatment is inherently linked in the English language to suffering – and to waiting.

In The Waiting Room, the first novel of author–doctor Leah Kaminsky, the link is suggested as early as the epigraph page, where the last entry in Katherine Mansfield's Journal reads: 'We all fear when we are in waiting rooms. Yet we all must pass beyond them ...' Throughout the book, the setting of a doctor's waiting room serves as an extended metaphor for a state of restless transience, and echoes the psychological enclosure of its protagonist, Dr Dina Ronen.

'I try to imagine going back': so begins a story about a woman remembering her childhood even when it seems she would just as soon forget it. Hope Farm is Melbourne writer and musician Peggy Frew's second novel. Her terrific début, House of Sticks (2011), was about, among other things, contemporary parenthood and the rhythm of conventional and unconventional lives. Hope Farm explores similar themes, but it pushes further and deeper. Although it is a realist tale, at times Frew's focus on the interpreting and recasting of memories leads to odd-shaped realities; although it is set in the 1970s and 1980s, the novel's focus on counter-culture gives it an unfixed, ethereal quality.

When Karen becomes pregnant aged seventeen, her parents shunt her from Toowoomba West to Brisbane to conceal her from gossipy neighbours. Having resisted heavy pressure to give up the baby for adoption, and now unwelcome at home, she moves to an ashram. There she names the baby Silver and renames herself Ishtar, and begins life again.

John Tesarsch's second novel, following the acclaimed The Philanthropist (2010), concerns the will of Henry Hoffman, a brilliant but taciturn mathematician who has committed suicide on his farm in rural Victoria. Hoffman's three children – doctoral student Eleanor, property entrepreneur Robbie, and concert pianist Sarah – are to varying degrees confounded by their father's final wishes: what possible motive might there be for the surprise his executor has delivered?

Jenny Ackland, in her fine début novel, re-imagines Australia's historical landscape, exploring a fictional world in which Ned Kelly fathered a son. Delving into relationships that span generations and continents, Ackland merges the stories of James Kelly, a young man who fights at Gallipoli in 1915 but 'won't kill any man' and Cem, a lost young man looking to connect with his roots in the Turkish village of Hayat in the 1990s.

While the novel's protagonists are all men, The Secret Son repeatedly examines women's place in society; it shines a light on the domestic and professional spheres they inhabit. Ackland depicts the conflicting roles of men as perpetrators of violence against women and as protectors of women, as shown in Australia and Turkey at different times. The power and strength of women is a recurring theme. Seen through the lens of Cem, however, it feels as though Ackland is undecided as to whether Australia or Turkey is the safer space for women. This risks reducing a complex feminist and cultural discourse to an irrelevant comparison.

'Everything is so sedate you could weep for vexation.' The first novel of literary academic Adrian Mitchell is a strange one. It is a fictional memoir that aims to inhabit the imagined world of the colonial artist S.T. Gill. This is a conceit that should free the narrative from the mundane, but The Profilist is a study in the ordinary.

The novel is narrated by Ethan Dibble, an imaginary artist standing in for Gill. Mitchell replicates a nineteenth-century voice, including its dry wit. It is a past, colonial ordinariness, and the details of struggling settlements, goldfields, explorations of the interior, and art exhibitions are impressive. The writing is at its best in the colourful array of minor characters. It is often immersive.

WHAT DREW YOU TO WRITING?

Some of my earliest memories involve sitting alone or even amongst people, making up stories and reimagining the world around me. I've never stopped doing that, so I guess it was a natural progression.

DID YOU STUDY WRITING? IF SO, WAS IT WORTH IT?

Yes, informally, then at university as a 'mature age' student. The formal study enriched my reading habits, and gave me the space to work out what really matters to me in terms of my own writing. Everything I've done in life was worth it, at some level.

While A.J.P. Taylor's famous assessment of John Monash was that he was the sole general of creative originality in World War I, the word 'creative' here is misleading. The real measure of Monash's celebrated genius, as Grantlee Kieza frequently points out in this massive tome, was that he learnt, not without mistakes, how to maximise every tool he was given in an integrated way. He was brilliantly innovative at manipulating the modern industrial weapons of war and by taking judicious departures from traditional military norms. He drew on every aspect of his engineering, legal, academic, military, and socio-cultural education and training to shape his wartime strategies, which he then ably communicated to others in the imperial command.

Kieza illustrates this from Monash's immaculate preparation in the Battle of Messines Ridge under the equally innovative Hubert Plummer's command:

Monash constantly studies aerial photographs of the landscape around Messines, and sends out 36 circulars on the planned manoeuvres. The machine-gunners' instructions come in seven parts. Each brigade practises its attack in a training area, and two large models are set up of the battlefield showing in miniature the trenches, wire entanglements, streams, roads and ruins.

Such preparation resulted in a singular triumph for Plummer's clever tactical use of exploding tunnels deep below the German-occupied villages of Messines and Wytschaete on the ridge. Plummer worked closely with the ninth and tenth British Army Corps and Monash's Anzac Corps. Monash and the Anzacs gained their first real recognition from Douglas Haig, the Allies' commander-in-chief, who henceforth had complete confidence in them. Under Monash, they soon became the glory boys of the war.

Derek Attridge is one of the most formidable theorists working today in the field of literary studies. His central strategy is to identify potential for recognition in the reading process of singularity and alterity, with the qualities of a particular work manifesting themselves most powerfully when they reveal 'unexpected possibilities of thought and feeling'.

Attridge is therefore relatively uninterested in literary history, which he sees as being concerned merely to describe 'general trends' without troubling to engage properly with individual works. This book, which includes some new material as well as a reprinting 'in revised form' of earlier essays, will be of particular interest to Australian audiences since Attridge, now based at the University of York in England, was born in South Africa and is a long-time friend and professional associate of J.M. Coetzee. Indeed, Coetzee looms large in this collection, being cited as early as the first sentence of the Introduction, with Attridge later describing how Adelaide's Nobel Laureate presents in his 'interviews and non-fiction writings ... one of the most compelling accounts of what it is to write literary works that I know'.

The first and most lengthy chapter, weighing in at ninety-four pages, involves a 'cross-examination' whereby the author interrogates himself about his own critical practices, mustering 'counter-arguments as strongly as I can, while providing space for responses that I hope are convincing'. This is an ingenious strategy, one that again bears some resemblances to Coetzee's self-scrutinising fiction. Attridge does of course risk acting here as his own judge and jury, and there is occasionally a sense of him setting up a straw man merely so that he can expound more fully his own ideas, but in general his academic outlook is remarkably wide-ranging, embracing music and the visual arts as well as literature. One later chapter is centred on 'Hospitality', and Attridge himself is a genuinely hospitable critic in his willingness to countenance ideas from many different positions and to engage with them through a process of intellectual dialogue.

Let's start with the title. The act of reading is anything but simple, as Fiona McFarlane and Gabrielle Carey both point out. Eyes, brain, and mind cooperate to create from a series of symbols with no intrinsic representative value a coherent message, or some amusing nonsense, or a persuasive argument, or a boring anecdote, or a parade of transparent lies.

Debra Adelaide has collected several previously published essays, and added to them several more written especially for this project, which might be described, succinctly, as writers on reading. As she explains in her introduction, the object of the book is to support young readers and writers through the Sydney Story Factory, and many contributors have chosen to write about their formative reading experiences.

A small town in the 1940s. We're paused here, slightly sweating, on a route march from the future. The houses are all wearing down, decrepit from a failed decade, and yet their window glass is polished. I recognise each house in detail, can almost name the families, but know too what the years have wrought. This one, that one. Weatherboard or brick or fibro, torn down in a day or two. A sort of mall and blocks of flats rise up to take their places. A few survive, cobwebbed and empty. Some are lovingly refurbished. The weather though is not much changed. The lawns and yards are no less parched, their fences still askew. A childhood has retrieved its sharpness while vanishing entirely. I know we're in a dream. But that will tell us nothing. A small town of the 1940s; war still throbbing to the north. And yet, despite the blackout code, its windows strangely shine.

Our fifth 'Poem of the Week' is 'Neuroward2East' by Jacinta Le Plastrier. ABR's Poetry Editor, Lisa Gorton, introduces Jacinta who discusses and reads her poem.

 Neuroward2East

You go back or forward or simply out,

past a self's meniscus.

You have been where we have not.

What do you return

from death's tenderness?

For days you stay only as breath

bonily, the leanest part,

shuttered behind the saw,

precise of the surgeon.

His hands at your skull

juggle the entrails

of all memory, fretting your life

for hours, a newborn thing

which nearly leaps

to break the thinnest rope

by which you span your spaces.

I sense you watch everything,

from in there, counting

across your palms still human,

days interleaving wrongly

with other days, the day

your brilliant blood flooded—

that which you adore,

what you would cast behind.

Jacinta Le Plastrier is a Melbourne-based poet, writer, editor, and publisher. See: www.jacintaleplastrierofficial.blogspot.com

Our final 'Poem of the Week' for 2015 is 'Déjà vu' by Maria Takolander. ABR's Poetry Editor, Lisa Gorton, introduces Maria who discusses and reads her poem.

Déjà vu

A poem addressed to Ted Hughes

Death had been peeled away from my husband like a caul.
The months – nine of them – had been long,
but there we were, reborn to the day,
domesticating each fugitive moment,
more in need of such rites of order than before.
It was still morning, the sun marshalled by the kitchen window,
when the aftershocks hit – not him, just me.
They were like flashes of radiation, epileptic jolts,
coming one after another, shredding my
hold on those routines that made the world rational.
Each one dragged nausea behind it like a comet's tail.
As I packed a lunch, drove my son to school,
I stalled and sparked:
but I have done this, I have done this before.
Soon I was so memory-full and memory-less
it was as if I had been contaminated by the galaxy
through which eons bled unchecked.

I should have known that history, time-traveller,
takes any opportunity to repeat itself.
I was intimate with its narcissistic sickness.
Ich, ich: like your first wife I had once sung, tongue-stuck,
ecstatically impaled by a past thrusting
itself upon me like a man-swan.
Back then I consulted an exorcist (of sorts)
and bound myself to the quotidian,
remaining unmolested for years – until that mechanical assault.
There was nothing poetic about it,
and I did not know how to make it so.
Then I began to think of your gambols
with the French mistresses of Ouija and Tarot
– and Sylvia and Assia, of course.
How the ungodly weight of the heavens cracked
and blacked its light upon your sightless head,
not once but twice.
And what poetry you made of déjà vu. 

Maria Takolander is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, The End of the World (Giramondo, 2014), which was reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Ghostly Subjects (Salt, 2009), which was shortlisted for a Queensland Premier's Prize. Her poems appear regularly in The Best Australian Poems, and have been anthologised in Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011) and the Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry (Turnrow, 2014). A program about her poetry aired on Radio National in 2015. The winner of the inaugural ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, Maria is also the author of The Double and Other Stories (Text, 2013), which was a finalist in the 2015 Melbourne Prize for Literature's 'Best Writing Award'. She is currently working on a novel for Text Publishing and is an Associate Professor at Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria. Her website is www.mariatakolander.com/

In 2012, Shaun Tan was commissioned to make pictures for a German publisher's edition of fifty of the Brothers Grimms' fairy tales, retold by Philip (His Dark Materials) Pullman. Pullman's challenge is that the tales do not necessarily benefit from illustration – he dismisses most as 'art school exquisiteness'. Tan's response was to return to his boyhood medium: sculpture. Inspired by the tales, he made twenty-five additional works, each 'about the size and weight of an orange'.

These small works, fabulously photographed, have now been published by Allen & Unwin. Extracts from Jack Zipes's translation of Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales – none more than 200 words long – sit alongside full colour plates. (Full annotations of the stories are at the back of the book.)

The evocative Prologue to this book has a poetic precision that bodes well for its treatment of this too-long neglected film, and what follows more than answers such expectations.

Jake Wilson's analysis (resuscitation might be a better word) of the 1976 Australian bushranging adventure, Mad Dog Morgan, is above all a tale of three men, and he does justice to each. The three are Morgan himself, director Philippe Mora, and star Dennis Hopper. In dealing with the wayward, vengeful Morgan, Wilson skilfully negotiates the blurred territory between fact and fiction; believing that 'the image of a crazed monster, encouraged by the newspapers, was not the whole story'. Did he deserve to have the scrotum removed from his dead body to provide a tobacco pouch for the Police Superintendent? And did this really happen?

Wilson is on surer ground in charting Mora's European background of artistic endeavour, along with his Australian childhood fascination with bushrangers. He was never going to fit the prevailing trends of the 1970s film revival here, and his preceding documentary features, Swastika (1974) and Brother Can You Spare a Dime (1975), suggested that this 'short, dark, precocious youth' had grown into a maverick at odds with the literary adaptations and realist dramas of the decade. But was he maverick enough to deal with his American star, Hopper, frequently drunk and/or drugged out of his mind, as he came to Australia trailing clouds of his friendship with that other rebel-without-a-cause, James Dean, and of his moment of glory with Easy Rider (1969), the 'low-budget biker film' that became a smash hit?

'Oh, I just don't know where to begin,' opens 'Accidents Will Happen', one of the best pop songs of Elvis Costello's four-decade recording career. The English songwriter (born Declan MacManus) has no such trouble with his generously sized memoir, which details the creation of so much of his work. 'A lot of pop music has come out of people failing to copy their model and accidentally creating something new,' he writes, and while he brags about being good at 'covering his tracks' when borrowing from others, he unabashedly uncovers them here.

Costello started out as an awkward presence; the cover of his first album, My Aim Is True (1977), presented him as a gangly wallflower brandishing a guitar. In one of many self-deprecating asides, he describes his early music as 'fidgety' but Costello's talent was clear even then. That first album yielded the enduring ballad 'Alison', while 'Less Than Zero' would later provide the title of Bret Easton Ellis's first novel. Costello was already spiking his modern-sounding tunes with more timeless influences like American soul and country as well as pop standards.

In England he started out on the DIY post-punk label Stiff Records, but benefited from interest in both English pubrock and radio-friendly New Wave pop. He toured continuously and released his next eight albums within a year of each other, winning critical acclaim while appealing to wider audiences with breakout tracks like 'Pump It Up' (still a staple of sporting events today) and the characteristically sharp-tongued, Northern Ireland-inspired 'Oliver's Army'.

The collage on the cover of Breezeway, John Ashbery's twenty-eighth book of poems, encapsulates his erudite multifariousness. The juxtaposition of Raphael's angel from Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints and de Chirico's The Enigma of Fatality with a nineteenth-century advertisement from Spanish Málaga resembles the pools of moments so typical of Ashbery's mercurial poetry. His poems eschew tailored epiphanies and replace them with multiplying and exacting fusions of interior and exterior to compel what is happening and passing, in a democratised polyphonic texture of permanent flux: 'Each moment / of utterance is the true one; likewise none is true' ('Clepsydra', from Rivers and Mountains, 1966).

Traversing art, music, history, television, Ashbery reinvents consciousness in the late twentieth century – and now the twenty-first. Some readers, finding Ashbery's unpredictability wearying rather than exhilarating, abandon interpretation in order to enjoy the sparkling ambience of his language – 'From the cast-iron / villas of the sanctimonious to the feathered huts / of the poor in spirit, a hush fringed all night'('Strange Reaction'). But what poetry communicates is what cannot be put any other way. As John Forbes said to an interviewer who asked him if his poetry was language-centred: 'Yes, like a brick wall is brick-centred.' To read Ashbery merely as play is to miss a great deal. What do his poems not encompass? They cover philosophy, elegy, love, obscure verse forms, jokes, nostalgia, games, sorrow, tragedy: that is, the eruptions and crinklings of time as experience, spilling and erasing meanings as it passes.

The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal, 1857) is the most celebrated and most influential collection of verse in the history of modern French poetry. Its author, Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), is seen as the embodiment of a sensibility we regard as 'modern'. T.S. Eliot called him 'the greatest exemplar of modern poetry in any language'.

Baudelaire's modernism is based on the experience of city life. The spectacular transformation of Paris by Baron Haussmann during Napoleon III's Second Empire (1852–70) not only reshaped the city physically but also broke down or blurred boundaries of every kind – cultural, social, perceptual. The dramatically new patterns of urban life dislocated and fragmented traditional relationships and frames of reference. Many people felt they had lost Paris and were dwelling in someone else's city.

Baudelaire called for a new aesthetic to match the challenges of 'modernity'. A new mode of representation was needed, he wrote, to match a new mode of perception. The exemplary artist would capture the thrill of the new – the speed and flux, the dizzy sense of change, that characterised modernity. Modern beauty, he wrote, lay not in the untouched scenes of nature prized by the Romantics, nor in the timeless themes of the classical tradition, but in the artificial creations of city life. Indeed, the city, being man-made, represented art itself.

In her introduction to Australian Love Poems (2013), Donna Ward wrote that poems 'are the prayers of a secular world'. Now, aided by editors Jordie Albiston and Kevin Brophy, she brings us a collection that tests this notion. The introduction by David Tacey states its case fervently, with, in this case, a bit too much determination that 'the sacred is ineradicable'. The poems, as poems this good always do, simply shrug off external premises.

Albiston and Brophy, neither of them a stranger to immanence, have come up with an outstanding selection, one that carries a sense of 'prayer' as interrogation. The feel is more of magic than of prayer, as the poems incant, describe, and name what there is and dismiss what is not, in a very pre-Socratic way, with all the imagination and terrible beauty that implies.

In this meticulously researched and eminently readable history, Jeannine Baker presents a gallery of impressive women who reported war news despite the obstacles put in their way by military authorities and press traditions alike. Along the way she deftly fills in key information about the conflicts involved, from the Boer War to Vietnam – a disturbing reminder of the extent to which Australia's twentieth century was shaped by engaging in military conflicts beyond its borders.

In an era when women serving in combat zones was unthinkable, and women serving in any military capacity was cause for consternation, the roles open to women war reporters were severely restricted. The home front, life behind the lines, the work of field hospitals and the like, were considered suitable topics for women to write about, 'from a woman's angle'. The real thing, combat, was the preserve of male war correspondents.

The ways in which Australian women reporters worked around these restrictions inspire Baker's story. It begins with the redoubtable Agnes Macready, a Sydney nurse and experienced journalist who went to South Africa to nurse the wounded and report on the conduct of the war to the Catholic Press, a paper whose lack of Empire loyalty allowed it to express sympathy for the Boers and to criticise the scorched earth policy pursued by the British. Edith Dickenson, designated 'lady war correspondent' for the Adelaide Advertiser, reported of the notorious concentration camps: '"refugee camps" is a misnomer; they are really prisons'.

Many public figures are fated to be remembered for a single incident rather than a lifetime's work (think of Gough Whitlam's ad-libbing outside Parliament house, or his nemesis's trousers, forever lost in Memphis). Often, almost perversely, it is one event that stays in the mind. For Keith Murdoch (1885–1952), that phenomenon was the so-called 'Gallipoli letter' of 1915. Most Australians know about the young journalist who wrote a letter exposing the Dardanelles campaign as a disaster where soldiers were dying in their thousands due to incompetent British leadership. The allied armies were soon evacuated. The 'Anzac spirit' was born.

However, Murdoch's role was darker, more nuanced, and far more interesting than the legend. Murdoch was in Gallipoli as an unofficial pair of eyes for Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, who was frustrated by the lack of information from Imperial headquarters in London. The original letter, written by fellow journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, was seized in transit by military police. Only then did Murdoch rewrite it for the Australian government. He also sent a copy to David Lloyd George, the British munitions minister and future prime minister. The letter was eagerly publicised in London by those who were against a second front (the anti-Churchill faction). Murdoch became the man of the hour. The boy from Camberwell never looked back.

Tom D.C. Roberts's life of Murdoch draws on a mass of previously unconsulted letters and diaries (seventy-five pages of dense notes detail his sources). It reveals a complex man who made a mark on our society far beyond the famous letter.

Western Australian novelist and academic Liz Byrski has written a memoir that explores the reality behind a World War II myth: the ground-breaking work done by plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe to repair the disfigured faces, hands, and lives of fighter pilots and crews. Byrski grew up during the war in East Grinstead, Sussex, near the hospital where McIndoe worked, and was haunted by the sight of the Guinea Pigs, as the men were called.

As the sixty-fifth reunion of the Guinea Pig Club approaches, Byrski decides to revisit her childhood home on a research trip for this book. Her intention is to uncover the female aspect of the story: how the nurses coped in the extraordinary Ward III. She also needs to put her childhood demons to rest.

How has David Plante managed to become as prolific a novelist as he has when so much of his time has been spent in flitting between gallery openings in New York, dinner parties and book launches in London, idyllic holidays in Italy and Greece, and teaching in Tulsa, Oklahoma? And those are just a few of the 'worlds apart' recounted in this so-called memoir – the book is really just a succession of extracts from Plante's diaries, with the dates removed. So are some of his novels, as we learn all but incidentally (The Country 'comes entirely from my diary'). There is no space allowed in these extracts for any sustained reflection on the craft or business of being a novelist: 'I almost never write in my diary about writing fiction.' In truth, there is little space in these pages for reflection on anything, and the only connecting thread between the extracts is provided by the lustrous quality of the names (the 'stellar cast', as he puts it) that seems to populate nearly all of the worlds he straddles.

At one point, describing a visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, he comes close to a serious engagement with questions of religious faith and of the nature of God, whom he doesn't – yet at another level does – believe in. It is a moving, impassioned passage for the paragraph or so it lasts. Yet what finally seems to matter to him in these spiritual agonisings, or in his recounting of them, is that someone famous should be there to share them with him: 'It was important to me that something should come over me and that I should tell Philip what it was ... How to explain to Philip ...' It is not Philip Anybody, of course; from earlier anecdotes in the book we know it can only be his fellow novelist, of even greater prolificity and distinction, Philip Roth. And the challenge to readers, in our celebrity-hungry culture, is whether we, too, would be so interested if it were not a famous name.

First published in 1969 and out of print for nearly forty years, Journey to Horsehoe Bend is a literary classic that envisions an Australian epic on a grand scale. That epical potential was recognised by composer Andrew Schultz and librettist Gordon Kalton Williams, whose cantata adapted from the book had its world première in 2004.

Journey recounts the desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempt over a few days in October 1922 to transport by horse-drawn wagon a critically ill German Lutheran pastor named Carl Strehlow from an isolated mission at Hermannsburg in Central Australia to a station where medical care was available. The painfully slow journey is infused by the author – the pastor's son – with myriad complex meanings derived from indigenous culture and his own memories of people and places.

After fiddling with the bits of leather designed to curtail a newly bought goshawk, T.H. White grumbled that 'It has never been easy to learn life from books' (The Goshawk, 1963). Helen Macdonald says the same thing, twice: all the books in piles on her desk, designed to help her deal with grief, cannot 'taxonomise the process, order it, make it sensible'. 'The books don't work,' she says. But it is The Goshawk and her own goshawk that pull her back into the world after her father's death, showing that books do work, but not on their own, and not in the way Macdonald imagined.

Each story Macdonald tells – of Mabel the goshawk, of White, of life after her father – wraps around the other like the jesses, swivel, and leash with which White fumbled. The prose has a hushed quality built from patient watching, from observing the hawk's flickering eyelids and the shuffling sounds of her preening. The silence is broken occasionally by the violence and movement of grief and the hunt. Wildness is not quite as separate as we like to imagine, and grief can show a different side of our own nature.

Hector Crawford is a unique figure in the history of Australian radio and television. The Australian Dictionary of Biography article (also by the author of this book) describes him as 'television producer, media lobbyist and musician', to which could be added radio producer, showman, and entrepreneur. Above all, he was a persistent and canny advocate of Australian content at a time when the infant television channels, eager to reap quick profit from the new medium, preferred cheap American imports to investing in local programming. Crawford lobbied, argued, cajoled, persisted: he has a right to be called, for better for worse, the father of Australian television.

Hector came from a hard-working, middle-class family, his father, Will, a commercial traveller, his mother, Charlotte, active in a local Protestant church as choirmaster and organist. Hector had a sister, Dorothy, two years his elder, who was to be important in his life. When Hector was ten, the family moved from down-at-heel Fitzroy to the much more desirable East St Kilda. Charlotte had aspirations for both her children, and given her background in church music it was not surprising that she should seize the opportunity for young Hector to audition for the boys' choir at St Paul's Anglican Cathedral. He impressed the legendary organist and choirmaster, Alfred Floyd, who is credited with having made the Melbourne choir equal to that of any English cathedral. Hector gained a sound musical education, and Floyd, who was a leading figure in Melbourne's music world, encouraged and advised him when, as a young adult, he was seeking to become involved in the city's choral music scene.

Military personnel on active service are deliberately put in harm's way. The harm can be physical, psychological, and moral. The first two kinds are well known if not well understood. But what of the third kind of harm? How does moral harm differ from psychological harm? This collection attempts to answer the question by bringing together the views of many people: experts, leaders, combatants, ex-soldiers, philosophers, psychologists, clerics. The result is a rich and varied set of insights.

The preferred term is 'moral injury'. Injury is lasting harm caused by an event or a series of events, so moral injury is most readily defined as a lasting moral harm caused by an event or a series of events. This might seem obvious at first sight, but the term is much contested. That it is a real phenomenon and something we need to understand is incontestable. Consider the experience of one particular contributor to the collection, who prefers to remain anonymous. It is the experience of a combat engineer and high-risk search adviser working in the Uruzgan Province of Afghanistan. His traumatic recollections include one particular incident that gives poignant testimony to the reality of moral injury. After a suspected improvised explosive device (IED) was discovered in a remote pass, the engineer faced the task of organising its disarming. The only available team had just returned to base exhausted and in need of rest. The engineer requested another team from headquarters, but none was available. Eventually, he decided to await the return of a resupply patrol. He informed the local Afghan forces and advised their commander to send Afghan troops to guard the site until the IED could be safely disarmed. He did so knowing that it was likely the Afghan soldiers would not stick with the plan and would abandon the site. When the IED exploded killing four civilians and wounding six others, including a woman and four children, the engineer punished himself by attending to the wounded on their transfer to base. He blamed himself for a slaughter he could have prevented, and was traumatised by the experience. The rest of his narrative sets out, with unnerving precision, the extent and depth of his suffering on return to civilian life.

The Sex Myth announces some lofty aspirations in its title, which invokes game-changing feminist interventions like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth (1991). Saturated as we are now by sex talk of all kinds, it is hard to imagine a critique of sex/gender mores having anything like the same impact. Nonetheless, Rachel Hills makes her bold ambitions clear with an epigram from novelist and short story writer Junot Díaz, who writes that 'the most toxic formulas in our culture are not passed down in political practice, they're passed down in mundane narratives'. The quote expresses the presence of the ideological in the fabric of the ordinary everyday, and thus both the difficulty and the importance of demystifying that which seems most natural. Demystification is a form of consciousness-raising, and, nostalgic as it may seem, The Sex Myth offers a potent demystification of the performance imperatives in contemporary sexual culture.

To begin, Hills confesses the private insecurities that stimulated her curiosity about other people's sex lives. She turned to the familiar sites of cultural studies of sexuality – magazines, digital spaces, popular culture, an extensive bibliography of social sciences literature – alongside an impressively sized, essentially ethnographic method: interviews with around two hundred people, mostly in their twenties and thirties. What she reports is that, contra the sexting epidemic and the 'booze-soaked, wet-T-shirt clad perma-party' depicted in the media, we are actually having far less and far worse sex than everyone imagines. Forty per cent of surveyed US college students hooked up with three or fewer people over the course of their college career. Against the myth of a hypersexual society, most young people just aren't having that much sex. Where in the past we were soiled by it, now we are substandard if we don't do it enough. We live amidst new and unachievable metrics of erotic performance to which our social value is tied. Pleasure, desirability, frequency, and quantity are labour forms at which we toil in the pursuit of sexual capital. 'An active sex life,' Hills writes, 'doesn't just satisfy us erotically; it represents desirability, self-agency and charisma.'

It is almost twenty-five years since Garry Wotherspoon's City of the Plain (1991) was published. In his ground-breaking history of Sydney's gay subculture, he stated that the 'history of life for lesbians in Sydney ... is more properly part of women's history'. Rebecca Jennings seeks to redress that gap in Unnamed Desires. She offers a nuanced understanding of Sydney's lesbian history from the 1930s to the late 1970s, one that remains alert to the interconnections between gender and sexuality in shaping lesbian experience.

Central to the complex and sometimes contradictory narratives that emerge is silence. This problem has been examined by, among others, Terry Castle in The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), where she aimed to 'bring the lesbian back into focus'. But, says Jennings, 'less scholarly attention has been devoted to analysing the meanings and nature of the silence surrounding lesbianism'. In this lively and fascinating study, she examines how silence has functioned as a disciplinary mechanism to keep unacceptable female same-sex desire out of cultural discourse, but also how women themselves have negotiated that silence to create meaningful and emotionally productive lives. She draws on interviews with lesbians and some drawn from archives, articles in gay and lesbian newspapers, scholarly literature from Australia and overseas and, in one case, from an extraordinary unpublished memoir by a woman who came of age in Sydney in the 1950s, Sandra Willson.

With marriage equality becoming the norm in Western countries (though, signally, not in Australia), it may be tempting to forget how recent and rapid and seemingly decisive changes in the legal treatment of, and social attitudes towards, homosexuality have been. The death of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu in late August 2015 marked the passing of the last living public figure prosecuted for homosexual offences. Sixty years ago, Lord Montagu was tried, convicted, and imprisoned for 'conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons'. Homosexual intercourse between consenting males in private was decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967 (but not until the early 1980s in Scotland and Northern Ireland). Decriminalisation in Australia was even more recent, spanning from 1973 in the Australian Capital Territory to 1997 in Tasmania.

The twentieth century, then, was the period in which the legal regulation of homosexuality in England changed decisively. These changes, of course, took political will. The interaction of homosexuality and politics in twentieth century England (broadly defined) forms the subject of Michael Bloch's latest book, Closet Queens. Bloch is well placed to write such a book, particularly about the second half of the twentieth century, having recently published his compelling biography of Jeremy Thorpe (2014), the leader of the Liberal Party who revived that party's fortunes, only to have his career in disgrace following a sex scandal and a failed prosecution. The Thorpe affair surely rivals the Profumo affair for the title of the most lurid sex scandal of twentieth-century British politics. Bloch's biography of Thorpe, though largely written in the 1990s, was not published until after its subject's death in December 2014.

Surely Mandy and Tim have met before. Floundering during her gap year, Mandy mostly watches daytime television and works at a sandwich shop. Tim, who is repeating Year Twelve under the guardianship of his uncle, tries to deal with teachers and assignments, and to move on from a nightmare year. Both characters are effusive about their love of music.

Mandy and her best friend have attended dozens of gigs in inner-western Sydney. Tim is now a solo musician after years of playing in bands. Before he steps onstage for a weeknight band competition, Tim observes Mandy across the room. Mesmerised, he knows he will remember this 'one-two punch' moment. Following Mandy and Tim as they build a relationship, Daniel Herborn does a terrific job of representing the intensity of their physical attraction. Later, events from Tim's past threaten the swift and blissful start to their relationship.

Reflecting on the first day she attended a clinic for eating disorders, Sydney poet Fiona Wright admits: 'I'm ... not sure that I would ever have gone ahead with the admission if I hadn't thought that I could write about it later.' This is a remarkably self-aware statement, one that encapsulates the fierce intelligence of her linked essays in Small Acts of Disappearance.

Wright labels this – her ability to inhabit her illness while recognising its storytelling potential – her 'double consciousness'. As readers we navigate this double consciousness and quickly learn to follow two stories at once: the story Wright wants to tell (essentially, the complex history of her anorexia), and the story she seems firmly opposed to telling (the simplistic road to recovery tale). 'This isn't a narrative of sudden healing, of epiphany or of discovery', several of her essays, in various ways, warn us. For many sufferers the causes of anorexia cannot easily be pinned down. Perhaps as a result, the search for meaning forms the backbone of Wright's book.

Second ball, day three of the 2014 Boxing Day Test match and Australian wicket-keeper Brad Haddin dives full length in front of first slip Shane Watson to catch Indian number three batsman Cheteshwar Pujara off Ryan Harris single-handed in the webbing of his glove. Virat Kohli replaces Pujara, and in the last over of the day he is still there, with 169 runs. He flashes and gets a thick edge to a ball by Mitchell Johnson. Haddin again dives wide to his right and takes another brilliant catch. Either miss could be forgiven: the first for the player not having removed sleep from his eyes, the second for visualising the froth on a beer after play. These were two of the most remarkable wicket-keeping dismissals I have witnessed, but they passed without comment.

Fast-forward half a year to the first morning of the first Ashes Test at Cardiff. England's batting is in strife at 3 for 43. Joe Root comes to the crease and is almost cleaned up first ball. Next ball he edges to Haddin, who dives full length to his right, only for the ball to rebound from his glove to the ground. Within minutes slow-motion replays have shown the miss ten times. Trial by technology! What could have been 4 for 43 becomes 430, and England goes on to win the match. Armchair experts in Australia immediately call for Haddin to be dropped from the side.

The Jolley Prize is now worth $12,500

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is the country's foremost short story prize, and we are delighted to be able to present it again in 2016. Generous support from ABR Patron Ian Dickson has enabled us to increase the total prize money from $8,000 to $12,500, of which the overall winner will receive $7,000 rather than $5,000. The runner-up will receive $2,000, and the third-placed author will receive $1,000. In addition, there will be three commendations.

As with all our prizes, the Jolley is open to writers anywhere in the world (stories must be in English). The 2015 Jolley Prize was won by Rob Magnuson Smith, who is based in the United Kingdom.

Rob Magnuson Smith at the Jolley Prize ceremony at the 2015 Brisbane Writers Festival

Authors are encouraged to enter online. See our website for more details about entering. Current ABR subscribers receive a discount when entering. We also have a special offer for new subscribers. This entitles them to enter at the discounted rate while also subscribing to the print or digital edition for a year.

The judges are Amy Baillieu, Maxine Beneba Clarke, and David Whish-Wilson. The winner will be announced at a ceremony during the 2016 Melbourne Writers Festival. The three shortlisted stories will appear in our August 2016 issue; and the three commended stories will appear subsequently.

Writers have until 11 April to enter. 

The fire this time

Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau) has won the US National Book Award for non-fiction. Alberto Manguel, nominating it as one of his books of the year in our December issue, described it as 'a fierce denunciation of racism arguing that prejudice creates the concept of race, and not the other way round'.

Ta-Nehisi Coates (photograph by Nina Subin)

Not perhaps since James Baldwin has there been such an excoriating African American writer. Coates is indignant and contemptuous by turns as he relates the indignities visited on African Americans by 'Americans who believe that they are white'. He eschews any facile sentimentality about the United States.

The book is most electrifying when Coates recalls the murder of a university confrère by a Baltimore policeman (who was almost inevitably exonerated). Rage seems to write this book: rage at the abiding risks to his fifteen-year-old son, to whom the book is addressed. Coates writes: 'Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made ... This entire episode took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.'

ABR Patrons' Annual Lecture

On 15 February 2016, Kim Williams AM will deliver the inaugural ABR Patrons' Annual Lecture at the University of Sydney, entitled 'Cultural Renewal in Modern Australia Philanthropy, public discourse and the role of the 'public academy' in the modern era.'

Kim Williams

Kim Williams has had a long and stellar career in news media, film and television, and music. Over four decades he has served on numerous boards in the cultural sector. Having been a long-term supporter of ABR, an arts advocate and a private investor in diverse creative arenas, he will explore the notion of what he describes as the 'public academy' in the modern era. Kim Williams will discuss philanthropy, thought leadership and policy agenda setting. He will reflect on directions in public discourse and on current trends in cultural policy determination. His lecture will focus on the need for open, respectful debate and on the primacy of renewal in policy and financial commitments from the public and government equally.

Kim Williams has held many positions including as CEO of each News Corp Australia, FOXTEL, FOX Studios Australia, the Australian Film Commission, and Musica Viva. He is the newest Commissioner of the AFL and recently completed a nine-year term as Chairman of the Sydney Opera House Trust.

Philanthropic support from more than 150 Patrons has transformed ABR in recent years. The ABR Patrons' Annual Lecture is an important expression of this altruism and a major contribution to cultural debate. We warmly thank all of our Patrons.

When: 6 pm, Monday, 15 February 2016
Where: Law School Foyer, Sydney Law School, Eastern Avenue, The University of Sydney
Bookings: This is a free event but bookings are essential.

ABR is delighted to be presenting the lecture in association with Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney.

Westerly and Randolph Stow

Western Australia's Westerly magazine recently launched a new issue (60.2). It features new fiction from Harriet McKnight (shortlisted for the 2015 Jolley Prize), and poetry from Jordie Albiston and Bruce Dawe. Soon after the launch, Westerly learned that it would not be receiving funds for its 2016 program from the Department of Culture and the Arts (WA). Next year the journal will rely on alternative support from the literary community.

The best way to support magazines – apart from reading them – is to subscribe; they won't survive without it. Westerly has a strong 2016 program, including The Randolph Stow lecture in February at the Perth Writers Festival, to be delivered by Suzanne Falkiner, Stow's biographer. (Falkiner's article entitled 'Randolph Stow's Harwich' can be found here).

RAFT Fellowship and Dahl Trust Fellowship are now open

To complement our suite of themed and non-themed writers' Fellowships, ABR is pleased to be able to offer the ABR RAFT Fellowship. We are seeking applications for a long work of journalism that explores the role and significance of religion in society and culture. For the first time, the Fellowship is worth $7,500 – an increase of fifty per cent on past Fellowships. This reflects ABR's commitment to supporting Australian writers and raising its fees. Applications close 31 January 2016.

The third ABR Dahl Trust Fellowship is also now open. The Dahl Trust Fellowship is for an extended essay on any aspect of Eucalypts. The ABR Dahl Trust Fellowship is worth $7,500 and applications close 20 February 2016.

Lifting the bar

Melbourne literary journal The Lifted Brow recently launched Issue 28: The Art Issue, featuring writing by Jane Howard, Melinda Harvey, and Benjamin Law, among others. It also announced a move into book publishing, starting with Melbourne-based writer and academic Briohny Doyle's first novel. Described as 'A postmodern science fiction tale in the vein of Philip K. Dick and Michel Houellebecq', Doyle's as-yet-untitled novel will be published in August 2016.

Republican speculations

Support for republicanism has undeniably waned since the defeat of the 1999 referendum, but there are signs that this may be changing. The odd princely 'captain's pick' by Tony Abbott certainly helped the cause, and author–journalist Peter FitzSimons's appointment as Chair of the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) has reinvigorated the organisation (formerly led by Malcolm Turnbull). Membership, we understand, quadrupled in 2015.

ARM has now published an anthology of republican short stories arising from its National Republican Short Story Competition. Speculating on the Australian Republic: Five Award Winning Short Stories (an e-book) is available online from Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo, and iBooks. The anthology presents a preview of Australia's future as a republic. It costs $4.55, and all proceeds go to the ARM. You can find more details here.

The Kat Muscat Memorial Fellowship announced

Express Media has announced the inaugural Kat Muscat Memorial Fellowship, in honour of the former Voiceworks editor who passed away earlier this year. The annual Kat Muscat Memorial Fellowship offers professional development up to the value of $3,000 for an editorial project or work of writing by a young, female-identifying author. The Fellowship aims to continue Kat's legacy and 'further develop the future of defiant and empathic young Australian women'.

Summertime

This is a double issue, one of two that we produce every year. The ABR staff will now take some leave, successively. The office will remain open over the summer break. The March issue, our next one, will feature the Peter Porter Poetry Prize shortlisted poems.

WHY DO YOU WRITE?

Randall Jarrell wrote: 'The ways we miss our lives are life'. That's one of the many reasons I write – to account for what goes missing.

ARE YOU A VIVID DREAMER?

I have a recurring dream about discovering an enticing space in my own home – a basement or garden – always just out of reach. Its residue is an elated sense of creative possibility. I like the sign the symbolist poet Saint-Pol-Roux put on his door before sleep: Poet at work.

WHERE ARE YOU HAPPIEST?

With my family, in unlikely places: the hospital where I gave birth to my children. I was once plainly happy alone in Berlin, and New York, but having children changes solitude. You're never so austerely alone again.

John McLaren, who died peacefully in St Vincent's Private Hospital on 4 December 2015, was a man of many fine attributes and talents, not the least of which was his capacity for friendship. John had many close friends towards whom he showed great loyalty, affection, and generosity. They, in their turn, recognised the strength and quality of the quite precious bond his character and personality made possible.

He was a towering presence intellectually and physically, although, as he would often admit with wry self-deprecation and an awkward wave of one long arm, somewhat uncoordinated, and he assumed effortlessly and without pretension a leadership or advisory role when he judged it appropriate and useful to do so. He was creative and productive wherever he worked, whether in bush schools or, as his career matured, in tertiary education, but his arrival at the Footscray Institute of Technology in 1976 was the beginning of his flowering as teacher, researcher, and intellectual. With a group of like-minded young colleagues, he set about establishing research and the humanities as integral to their collective enterprise and not the poor cousins they had become in other institutions of technology. As Professor Peter Dawkins, Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University, observed, John led from the front, undertaking and completing a PhD on the medieval university that was memorable for its contribution to the field, its exemplary research skills, and its lucidity.

His passionate and knowledgeable championship of the arts and of Australian literature, in particular, led him to embark, as Editor, on the resurrection of Australian Book Review when it was revived in 1978 by the National Book Council. He held the position until 1986. The meetings of the reviewing team at John and Shirley McLaren's North Carlton house were legendary for their rousing debates, commitment to the literary task, and Shirley's splendid suppers. John was also Associate Editor of Overland, supporting his close friend Stephen Murray-Smith for many years and taking over the editorship from 1993 until 1997.

The first issue of the second series of Australian Book Review, June 1978

In the meantime, as well as teaching and working as Associate Dean in Research and Training, John wrote many books including Melbourne: City of Words (2013) and Not in Tranquillity: A Memoir (2005). His biography, Journey without Arrival: The Life and Work of Vincent Buckley (2009), was awarded the Walter McCrae Russell Award for literary scholarship. His output of essays, articles and occasional polemical correspondence was prodigious, strenuously left-wing, and continued until he could no longer manage his computer.

John could be fierce in debate, but, above all, he was a tremendously amiable, gentlemanly bloke – a truly wonderful human being. With Shirley, to whom he was devoted, and his family, he reached out to friends and cared for them. Toddlers were embraced; twenty-somethings, including mine, were fed or housed without stint and unconditionally.

The literary culture which he served so well, the polity of which he was a stringent, discerning critic, the world of bonhomie and life affirmation, and above all his many close friends are all the poorer for his passing.